There are two sentences I have heard that I imagine you have heard as well. They both ring true, but they also seem to contradict one another. The first (and more common) statement is this: “There’s no such thing as a bad question.” The second is this: “Now that’s a good question.” If it’s possible for there to be no bad questions, how can there be some questions that are better than others? Doesn’t that mean that some questions are so much better than other questions that the questions at the bottom should be considered bad? Maybe so, but that is not what I want to argue in this post. 

Reversing the Focus

In previous posts, I have written that poor questions prompt poor answers. This is to say that small group leaders are sometimes frustrated by the quality of answers that students give. This frustration is understandable. At the same time, leaders do well to consider the quality of their questions before they critique the quality of the students’ answers.

In this post, I want to argue that some questions are better than others and that small group leaders should seek to help students improve their questions. When people say “There are no bad questions,” they are normally trying to encourage free inquiry, or the freedom for any and all kinds of questions to be asked. But when people say, “Now that’s a good question,” they mean that the question has hit upon a topic or idea that is particularly interesting or important.

We might compare questions to playing the board game Battleship, where two players sit across from each other and call out locations on a grid on which the opposite player has stationed their navy boats. A successful call counts as a hit, and the play continues to call locations around the first hit until the other player’s boat is sunk. Asking questions is a bit like this. One person is asking something and hoping to light upon a topic, an idea, or information that another will give. Not all questions are equally useful in this regard. In that sense, some questions are certainly better than others.  

If poor questions by leaders prompt poor answers from students, the inverse is also true. Poor questions from students will prompt poor answers from leaders. More often than not, the leader does better to help the students articulate the question they are really asking than directly to answer the questions students ask. In other words, it is often a bad idea to answer the student’s question as it is stated. It is normally better to ask a question back at the student, not to challenge the question, but to seek to understand better what it is that the student is asking. The goal is not to argue with any implied premise in the question, but to understand it. Very often, I have found that if I ask a question or two to explore what the student means by the question, the student clarifies the intention and, more often than not, alters the original question to something that elicits deeper thinking and stronger connections to other ideas.

Questioning Premises 

How do leaders do this? Question the premises behind the question. When the Samaritan woman questioned Jesus about his request for a drink, he told her that she would ask him for water if she knew with whom she was speaking. The woman assumed Jesus shouldn’t speak to her because he was a Jew and she was a Samaritan. But Jesus’ response threw her off her guard. It was unexpected. It was disruptive to her thinking. It piqued her interest. And Jesus was right to do it because her thinking was wrong. She did not understand who Jesus was, and Jesus turned the tables on her question to make her question herself. Did she really understand what she was doing? Did she know what she was asking? Had she read the situation correctly enough to ask a relevant question? By surprising her in the way he did, Jesus set up the woman for a conversation she surely would never forget. Jesus is unique, of course, but His basic approach was to question her premises. No doubt she was glad he did so. The students often will be, too.  

So often, students know that they do not understand something well, but they do not understand what information they are missing. As a result, students will ask questions that do not accurately reflect the information they are seeking. They do not know how the knowledge they lack would fit in with the rest of their knowledge, so they ask questions that are vague or misleading. In other words, students are often so unclear in their thinking that they are ignorant of how to ask the kinds of questions they really want to ask. 

There are few intellectual tools as powerful and useful as the ability to formulate good questions. Good questions are characterized by a self-awareness of the limits of personal knowledge. In other words, in order to find out what you do not know, you need to start with what you know and work toward the edges of your knowledge, where knowledge is bounded by ignorance. Because students are so young in their thinking, their knowledge is mostly made up of assumptions and intuitions they take for granted. If knowledge is justified true belief, the students may have plenty of true beliefs, but they do not know how to justify those beliefs for themselves.[1] Their web of knowledge is mostly not a web; it is often a tattered collection of wispy threads of thought held together at obscure points, and mostly flapping dangerously in the wind. Even the most confident and well-informed students often have a weak structure. They have more data points, perhaps, than other students, but their key anchor points are still weak and easily moved. I think this is probably the case because most of their life has been spent accruing information, but they have not had time for it to process into wisdom based in the fear of Yahweh. This is one reason why students who seem so solid to so many adults offer a shock and surprise when the students turn away from the Lord following high school. The adults mistook the bits of information they could articulate for proof of a heart that devoted all that knowledge to living for God. But they never lived for God. They could only regurgitate what they were told about Him. They maybe read their Bibles and other books, but there was never a work of the Spirit in them causing them to turn to God and live for Him.

Conclusion

Small group leaders can begin to help construct a web of knowledge for the students that is tethered to principles that are replete in Scripture. This does not happen by telling the students what to think. It happens by allowing the students to reason their way forward and understand where they are stuck. Once there, leaders do not have to pick up the students and carry them. The goal is to help the students to learn to think. If leaders do all the thinking for them while they are in youth, then other leaders will do all the thinking for them when they are not. Obviously, we do not want that. The students may be able to trust our answers, but if we teach them that their ability to know what is right, good, and true depends on their leaders, then we are setting them up to be led astray in the future by leaders whose answers the students do not know they should not trust. We do not want the students to become more dependent on us but less dependent. We want them to develop in the direction of becoming leaders in their own lives and in whatever spheres in which they have responsibility, such as future families God gives them.

[1] “justified true belief” is a classic definition of knowledge.